How China’s Aviation IT Leader Earned Top‑Tier DevOps Certification

Domestic and international large enterprises have shown that standardization and tool empowerment are key to success. The DevOps standards and the DevOps continuous delivery pipeline platform can significantly improve quality, efficiency, safety, and agility, enhancing market competitiveness.

China Information and Communication Technology Academy (CAICT) has developed a series of "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" standards that guide enterprise DevOps implementation. Companies from banking, securities, insurance, telecom, and internet sectors have participated in CAICT assessments, improving their IT capabilities.

On December 15, 2023, the GOLF+ IT New Governance Leadership Forum was held in Beijing, where CAICT announced the latest batch of DevOps and AIOps standard assessment results.

China Civil Aviation Information Network Co., Ltd. (China Aviation Information) participated with its "Flight Management System" project, which passed the CAICT "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model – Technical Operations Standard Level 2+" assessment, indicating a leading domestic capability.

Notably, China Aviation Information is the first aviation industry company to pass the DevOps standard assessment.

Interviewed were Deputy General Manager Xing Tongkun and senior Open System Operations Engineer Li Ning, who shared details of the project and their experiences.

Q&A

Q: Please introduce the project you evaluated.

Xing Tongkun: The project is the Flight Management System, one of the three core systems of the Passenger Service System (PSS) in civil aviation. It supports airline planning, queries, inventory control, seat map management, and passenger itinerary guarantees, handling massive concurrent online transactions with high complexity, intensive transactions, strong real‑time requirements, and stringent security and reliability demands.

The system processes peak loads exceeding 10,000 transactions per second, with average inventory calculation response time under 5 ms, built on China Aviation’s self‑developed cloud computing platform, serving billions of passenger trips annually.

Q: How do you feel about achieving the DevOps technical operations Level 2+ assessment?

Xing Tongkun: We appreciate CAICT’s recognition and support. The assessment validated our technical operations and business continuity work, providing guidance for future improvements. Over 20 of the 35 capability sub‑domains reached Level 3, confirming the feasibility of our construction approach.

Q: What considerations guided the selection of this project for assessment?

Xing Tongkun: We chose a system that is representative in business, technology, and importance, and whose technical operations maturity is relatively high. The Flight Management System, built on a cloud‑native architecture, already has mature monitoring, incident handling, change management, and capacity management practices, aligning with SRE principles.

Q: What does the DevOps standard mean to you?

Li Ning: DevOps has become an industry consensus for guiding IT system construction, promoting automation across development, testing, deployment, and operation, improving product lifecycle quality. It emphasizes digital and platform‑based methods to continuously elevate operational efficiency.

The assessment highlighted improvements such as automated incident response, closed‑loop configuration and capacity management, enhanced monitoring‑alert integration, and refined platform interconnectivity for fine‑grained operations.

The Flight Management System adopts domain‑driven design, micro‑service decomposition, and a cloud‑native platform with distributed databases, enabling rapid scaling, fault isolation, multi‑dimensional rate limiting, and automatic circuit breaking, ensuring robust service continuity.

CAICT’s DevOps Capability Maturity Model, jointly developed with leading internet, finance, and telecom companies, is the first comprehensive DevOps standard worldwide, recognized by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and adopted by many major enterprises. The standard covers process, continuous delivery, technical operations, DevSecOps, system and tool evaluation, business value management, collaborative development, continuous testing, performance measurement, platform engineering, and reliability engineering.

For further information on DevOps standard assessments, contact CAICT representatives Liu Kailin (phone 156 5078 6171, email [email protected]) or Bai Hanxiong (phone 159 1076 9206, email [email protected]), as well as Wei Huanxin from the Efficient Operations Community (phone 185 0025 5645, email [email protected]).